One more point that may clarify things: I think you’re lumping applying science to the problem of making things under science whereas to me that’s the essence of engineering. That is, the scientist seeks to understand things for their own sake whereas the engineer asks “what can I build with this?” Again these are obviously idealized, extreme characterizations.
With respect to COVID, we ought to allocate some credit to engineering for building the high-throughput systems that enable rapid testing and experimentation. We also will require some impressive engineering to scale up vaccine production once we hopefully have a viable vaccine.
One more point that may clarify things: I think you’re lumping applying science to the problem of making things under science whereas to me that’s the essence of engineering. That is, the scientist seeks to understand things for their own sake whereas the engineer asks “what can I build with this?” Again these are obviously idealized, extreme characterizations.
With respect to COVID, we ought to allocate some credit to engineering for building the high-throughput systems that enable rapid testing and experimentation. We also will require some impressive engineering to scale up vaccine production once we hopefully have a viable vaccine.